Embodiments of the inventive concept relate to nonvolatile memory systems, and more particularly, embodiments of the inventive concept relate to nonvolatile memory systems for controlling the size of a user storage region therein based on changed user region information, and to methods of adaptively adjusting a user storage region in the nonvolatile memory system.
Flash memory is widely used in a variety of different nonvolatile memory applications. Some examples include universal serial bus (USB) drives, digital cameras, cellular phones, smart phones, tablet personal computers (PCs), memory cards, and solid state drives (SSDs).
Generally, a flash memory device is configured to include a plurality of memory blocks, and each of the blocks includes a plurality of pages. Each page includes a plurality of memory cells, typically connected to a same word line. Each of the memory cells may be implemented as a single-level cell (SLC) which stores a single bit per cell, or a multi-level cell (MLC) which stores two or more bits per cell. A program operation is performed on a page by page basis, while an erase operation is performed on a block by block basis.
The blocks contained in a flash memory device may be designated in advance to define a user storage region of the device that is available to a user to store data and to read data there from, and a nonuser storage region of the device that is unavailable to the user. The size of the user storage region and the size of the nonuser storage region are fixed during fabrication by the manufacturer of the flash memory device.